The foreign ministers of Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) traveled to Israel on Mar. 28 to discuss “peace and stability in the region” in a rare meeting with their Israeli and American counterparts. The Negev Summit, as the gathering was officially dubbed, was preceded by a Mar. 22 tripartite meeting between the leaders of Egypt, Israel and the UAE that also primarily dealt with regional security. In the days between these Arab-Israeli meetings, King Abdullah of Jordan hosted high-ranking officials from Egypt, Iraq and the UAE on Mar. 26.

What the three important gatherings have in common is a focus on the regional activities of Iran and its non-state allies. In particular, the Negev Summit has been seen as an attempt to create a regional security architecture to counter Tehran.

Iran’s reaction to rare summit in Israel

The initial reactions of Iranian officials to the Negev Summit was to downplay its importance to Iranian interests and instead focus on the Palestinian issue. Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh on Mar. 28 called the gathering “an evil meeting in occupied Palestine,” describing it as a “betrayal of the Palestinian cause.”

But as the anti-Iran focus of the summit became apparent, Iranian officials became more outspoken in their reactions. In a phone call with his Iraqi counterpart Barham Salih, President Ebrahim Raisi said that “any country in the region that neglects the hegemonic goals of the United States and the Zionist regime will both disregard the interests of its nation and will spur Muslim nations’ anger.”

Iranian military officials were even more straightforward. In a direct warning to “some regimes on the southern side of the Persian Gulf” which have established ties with Israel—referring to Bahrain and the UAE—Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) chief commander Hossein Salami said those relations “pose a serious threat to the security of the region and to those regimes themselves.” He added that the burgeoning Gulf-Israel ties are “not acceptable at all.”

Rising threat perceptions

The reactions from Tehran clearly indicate an increased Iranian threat perception due to Israel’s growing presence in Iran’s immediate southern neighbors. The Islamic Republic was first alarmed in Aug. 2020, when the Gulf Arab-Israel normalization process began under the Abraham Accords. At the time, senior Iranian officials—including Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mohammad Baqeri—issued warnings to the UAE, which pioneered normalization with Israel among Iran’s southern Arab neighbors.

Nevertheless, Tehran apparently hoped that with the departure of former US president Donald Trump (2017-21), the idea of using the Abraham Accords to form a regional coalition against Iran would be cast aside. Or at the very least, that Iran’s southern neighbors would take its warnings seriously and not develop relations with Israel beyond the formal level.

Less than two years later, however, Arab relations with Israel have not only deepened at the political level, but they have increasingly expanded into the military and security spheres. In one recent example, the UAE and Israel announced that they are working together to develop counter-drone systems. Earlier, in Nov. 2021, the Bahraini and Emirati navies also held their first joint military exercise with Israel.

The irony is that the growing desire of Arab states to cooperate with Israel is, at least partly, driven by their own increasing threat perception due to the activities of Iran and its allies. For instance, the Emirati-Israeli cooperation to build an anti-drone system is clearly related to the UAE’s concern over the Yemeni Houthi movement’s unprecedented drone attacks, which began in January. At the same time, the covert war between Iran and Israel has come out into the open over the past several months. Most recently, the IRGC on Mar. 13 fired ballistic missiles at what it claimed to be a “Mossad headquarters” in Iraqi Kurdistan.

It was later reported that the Erbil strike came in response to an earlier Israeli attack on a drone facility inside Iran. Whatever the actual reason for the missile attack, the fact is that mutual Arab and Iranian threat perceptions—coupled with the growing confrontation between Iran and Israel—are taking the region to the precipice.

Iran’s rules for using military force

The rival sides have responded differently to this increasingly threatening situation. Israel and some of Iran’s Arab neighbors, as explained above, are forming a coalition to balance the Islamic Republic and its non-state allies. In contrast, Iranian leaders appear to be establishing three rules of engagement as the foundation of their regional security approach.

First, Iran will not hesitate to take military action outside of its borders to counter threats; second, the response to any threat will not necessarily be proportionate and could be on a much larger scale; and third, Iran’s response will target not only the threatening actor, but also the area from which the threat originated.

The first rule is nothing new and lies at the heart of Iran’s long-established “forward defense” strategy, which is aimed at countering threats far beyond Iranian territory before they reach Iran’s borders. Iranian military strategists have cited this concept to justify Iran’s military involvement in Iraq and Syria, especially during the fight against the Islamic State group (IS).

The second rule became apparent for the first time in June 2017, when Iran conducted a missile strike against IS positions in eastern Syria. In that operation, which was carried out in response to a terrorist attack at the Iranian parliament days earlier, six ballistic missiles were fired at IS positions in Deir Al-Zor. Another major demonstration of this rule was Iran’s response to the Jan. 2020 US assassination of then IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, in which American forces in Iraq’s Ain Al-Asad base were bombarded with ballistic missiles.

The threshold for Iran’s use of ballistic missiles appears to have since been lowered. In Sept. 2021, the IRGC targeted the headquarters of an Iranian Kurdish insurgent group based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Last month’s missile strike on Erbil is the latest example of this same approach. In other words, Iranian ballistic missiles are no longer considered as a merely nominal or symbolic means of deterrence, but as a ready tool to use against actual or perceived threats.

Finally, the third rule indicates that from Iran’s perspective, the geographic source of a threatening act is as important as who is behind the threat. Iran’s main goal in establishing this rule is to increase the cost for any state that hosts the threatening actor, thereby forcing that state to reconsider its policies. The main logic behind the strike on Ain Al-Asad and the subsequent attacks by pro-Iran armed groups on US positions in Iraq was to force the Iraqi government to reconsider its ties with Washington and ask US forces to leave the country. In the same vein, following the recent attack on Erbil, Iranian officials insisted that Iraqi officials should stop “Israeli activities” in the Kurdistan region.

Iran’s recent warnings to its southern Arab neighbors should be interpreted in the light of these three rules. Ultimately, it could be argued that Iran’s heightened threat perception has caused a decrease in the threshold of its use of military force, thus significantly increasing the risk of escalation in the Persian Gulf region.